Twilight Render User Forum

Here is my latest project. A kitchen in a luxury apartment over looking the River Thames in the exclusive part of Chelsea, London.

I have not yet presented to the client but hope to win the order and wow the client with my visuals.

This is the first of several views
Easy 9 over night with SU line detail overlay at 7%

C&Cs welcome

I like the style and the modelling very much! Materials and colors choice too. I believe you could use some post-processing to improve the final result, something like the attached image, it would pop out the details.

Btw, what is the distance between the chairs and the kitchen underpart? I seems they are too close to each other. The plates and glasses look a bit too big to me, but it might be the wide angle perspective.

Maybe some entourage on the worktop would do good too.

Regards

Serafim

Unclebim. thanks for your comments. I've never been good at pp. I really like what you've done. Could you give me some idea of how you got to where you did with the image. I have Photoshop and Gimp but have never really used them. I can see you've heavily sharpened the image but I notice there is more depth... The light colours are lighter and the dark darker. I've had a go in Gimp and will post later.
Thanks Dan

After some PP in Gimp I 've attached a couple of views. One has turned out more green-grey than the other. I'm not sure which I prefer. Anyway let me know your thoughts

I like the model very much. Lights out well. But it is too loud. Increase the contrast is pointless, because your image burn, burn the doors, worktops disappear. Q: What color kitchen cabinets? Grey? If you are using HDR environment and you have an open wall, it is understandable. Interior lighting should be warmer, since it is now very cold and not comfort.

Hi Alvadys. Thanks for your comments. I'm not using an HDR but am using a Sky Probe and sun is enabled as well. The colour is meant to be grey not green. I'm not sure about the Greener image. I want to get the image warmer but am really struggling as I don't know Gimp very well. There is a fair amount of green shinning through the window as there are several trees outside. The room in reality is very light. I spend several hours playing around last night but am still not happy with the images. I would love to get to your level of producing images that look almost like photos!!

Dan

Dan the power of the lights themselves is too high, causing the image to burn out. (be pure white in places near the light sources)

Check out the difference for this case where the lights were too bright (too bad we were asked to remove the images, because the images spoke volumes.) However, the light settings before and after are still shown.

If you wish, send the scene to support at twilightrender dot com and we can maybe help you out with the lights.

Dan, I don't have the time now to write extensively but basically what I did is increase the local contrast which is not the same as increase contrast - http://www.photo-plugins.com/index.php? ... &Itemid=43 - adjust levels as desired, it is a Photoshop plugin but you an run it under Gimp too provided you have the PSPI plugin installed http://tml.pp.fi/gimp/pspi.html. If you run Gimp 2.6.11 it will not run Local contrst enhancement (LCE), so you need Call XNView http://registry.gimp.org/node/24977 and XNView itself. Or you run LCE under Photoshop.

I exaggerated things a bit as I sharpened the image at the end which would be too much most of the times after LCE.

You can make the image warmer with a light orange (peach) layer above the render and adjust opacity.

In order not to loose details in highlights and shadows I save the original render image at three different camera exposition settings, say 0,8 - 1,0 - 1,2 and then blending these with the Exposure Blend script in Gimp http://registry.gimp.org/node/25056.

I hope this helps.

Thanks Serafim. That was detailed enough to get me started

Important tips when lighting interiors:

1. Place lights where they belong. (you have done this!)
2. use as few lights as possible
3. be careful not to apply emitters to round or spherical objects, because each object will be subdivided into triangles by the engine before starting to render. Any circle will become as many light sources as it has segments. 48 segment circle = 48 lights.

Subject: Best Can Light Design for Twilight
Subject: Lights - render times...
Subject: pointlight / light emitter
Subject: Color of Lights / Light Render Speed Comparison
Subject: Lighting Made Simple

This scene contains 38 light sources NOT INCLUDING LIGHT EMITTERS. (those 38 sources are radius 50mm=5cm= 10cm diam. That's too wide. Make them 1cm diameter=.5cm radius, 5mm radius.
Benefits of this approach:

1. more realistic light source size, (think of the size of a filament in a light bulb, the true "light source")
2. less likely conflict with nearby geometry,
3. render more quickly because the soft shadow being calculated for each light source takes longer for larger radius light sources.

Including light emitting surfaces, the scene has an additional 1296 light sources (counting ceiling can components "spotlight" only!).[/b]

So, the scene has 1334 lights.
Could this be why it's rendering so slowly?
Ideally, the cans should go deeper into the ceiling, and the TWL spotlight object should be slid up INTO the can until it lights BOTH THE CAN AND THE SCENE. This ELIMINATES the need for any emitter in the cans at all.
Alternatively, a very quick mod. is to make the circle emitter into a square = 2 lights instead of 48.